In recent years, relative clauses with Verb Second (V2) have received a lot of attention. This is
due to their peculiar syntactic and semantic properties. On the one hand, the content of the relative
clause is asserted, indicating – given certain theoretical assumptions further addressed
below – its non-subordinated status, on the other hand, they allow for a restrictive interpretation,
indicating its subordinated status, since the restrictive reading under standard assumptions
requires that the relative clause is interpreted within the DP heading it.
Moreover, V2 has been argued to be a root phenomenon and clauses containing V2 should
thus display root-like properties. One important property of root clauses is that they – contrary
to regular embedded clauses – can represent different types of speech acts: assertions, questions,
commands and so on. It thus comes as little surprise that the best analysis of V2-
relatives on the market, namely that by Gärtner (2001, 2002), posits an analysis in which two
(main) clauses are coordinated, explaining the presence of V2 in the relative clause and relating
it to the proto-assertional force of the relative. This syntactic analysis renders the semantic
interpretation of V2-relatives a rather complex issue, since the content of the relative clause
must be integrated into the interpretation of the DP heading it during the computation of the
matrix clause to derive the correct restrictive interpretation.
We propose an alternative account that assumes that V2-relatives are regular subordinated
relative clauses that due to the specific property of embedded V2 need to be extraposed and
are interpreted in a high-adjoined position in the matrix clause. The restrictive interpretation of
the relative clause will be argued to be derived from a matching analysis of relative clauses in
which (weak) quantifiers contained in the head NP are interpreted in the embedded clause
whose interpretational properties follow from the information structural properties of the main
clause and the specific contribution of V2 in the relative clause.